Telemarketing Software Featured Article

Sales enablement tools make a huge difference. Until recently, however, they were too clunky and often didn’t deliver on their promise.

A good sales enablement solution can make a big impact on a company. Sales enablement drives better alignment across sales and marketing, and IDC has shown that this can lead to as much as a 10 percent increase in top line revenue growth.

Further, market research firm Aberdeen (News - Alert) has found that sales performance can be improved significantly with enablement tools. It can boost total team quota attainment from the average of 62 percent to 99 percent. It can create a year-on-year revenue growth of up to 13 percent compared with the industry average of 4.3 percent. Use of sales enablement software also can improve the average sales cycle by 3 percent, much better than the .4 percent industry average.

The problem is that many companies have tried sales enablement software in the past with less than stellar results. The software historically has been clunky, tied to the office, not properly connected with other systems, and built with techies in mind instead of sales teams. Organizations could benefit from such software—if they could force themselves to change how they worked.

Thankfully, things have gotten much better.

The cloud has simplified many sales enablement solutions and enables marketing and sales to direct the purchasing decisions. Sales enablement now is easier to use, and something sales and marketing teams can deploy themselves.

Mobile devices and the cloud have also helped with mobility. Reps can carry their software with them now, and access it from their phones and tablets. This has meant that sales enablement is no longer something just for when the sales team gets back to the office.

IT systems and analytics have gotten smarter, so sales enablement is more useful than ever before, with analytics that can help boost sales more quickly.

The user experience also is improved, again because of the cloud. Since businesses can stop using a cloud service at any time without being stuck with unused software, this has forced sales enablement solutions in the cloud to improve their user interface and make such systems easy to use and less clunky.

While sales enablement solutions have long been useful, they now also arguably are ready for real-world use.

Let the improvement in sales begin.